Rupert Penry-Jones, dashing star of the drama 'Silk’, talks about what British
TV must learn from the US and life with actress Dervla Kirwan

Rupert Penry-Jones, tall, blond, broad as a Welsh warrior from the Mabinogion, is striding across the floor of a Soho restaurant, apparently impervious to the questioning glances of his fellow diners.

Status-conscious chaps are noting the expensively clunky Tag Heuer on his wrist, the fine-gauge cashmere sweater and the Belstaff leather jacket, and racking their brains as to where they know him from. The club? The Bar? The secret service?

The women’s endorphins are fizzing like Champagne bubbles because 43-year-old Penry-Jones, Spooks spy, Silk barrister and straight-from-central-casting toff is head-turningly, matinée-idol handsome. But not that I’ve noticed.

“I’m under strict instruction from my wife not to talk too much about her or family life,” he says, pulling a schoolboy face. “I don’t want to tread on any toes.”

Indeed not. His wife, Irish actress Dervla Kirwan, 42, is famously spirited. I almost used the F word – but she gets terribly, ahem, “spirited” about being called feisty, which she says is a euphemism for an unpredictable Irishwoman who gets a bit lairy and argumentative after a drink.

She’s right, of course, and, being just such an Irishwoman myself, I expect we would have oodles in common, especially with a drink in us.

But today I have Penry-Jones all to myself, defending her honour after news reports of a spat between his wife and his mother, the To The Manor Born actress Angela Thorne, at an upmarket Mayfair brasserie. Things got so heated that they had to cancel dinner and take separate cabs home. The intimation was that it was some sort of clash of cultures. Not so, asserts the man in the middle.

“The incident was blown out of all proportion,” he sighs. “It was ages ago, in 2009, and we were meeting up at a difficult time, just after my father had died. Emotions were raw and we were expressing grief in different ways, so the best option was just to cut our losses and leave.”

Kirwan and Thorne have long since made up, says Penry-Jones, and his mother is a doting grandmother to the couple’s two children, Florence, aged nine, and seven-year-old Peter.

Penry-Jones, whose Welsh father, Peter, was also an actor, is, despite his surname, the very epitome of Englishness, having been brought up in London and educated at Dulwich College.

Having decided that acting would also be his métier, he attended Bristol Old Vic theatre school, but was expelled for “disruptive” behaviour.

“I couldn’t stand all the tap-dancing and singing that went on,” he says. “I just wanted to act, and in that respect I’m old school; I don’t go and live in the slum where my character lived for three months before filming in order to get a feel for him. I’m far too lazy.”

After being violently dispatched from Spooks in an explosion, Penry-Jones is currently on our screens, playing an ambitious QC alongside Maxine Peake, in the must-watch legal drama Silk.

It’s an intelligent show that, as with Spooks, flatters its viewers with entre nous ellipses rather than hammering home every point. The main frustration is that, with a run of just six episodes, it hooks viewers then leaves them hanging.

“If we want to push boundaries and make great TV, we need to emulate the American networks who placed their faith in certain shows, like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, regardless of low initial ratings, and took a risk by recommissioning them,” says Penry-Jones, who has previously spoken of his dismay that Whitechapel, the gritty detective series in which he starred, was abruptly cancelled after four series.

“In this country there’s a huge reluctance to make that commitment. There’s still an over-reliance on overnight viewing figures that simply doesn’t reflect how people watch television in the age of the download.”

But he’s not exactly twiddling his thumbs; at the risk of typecasting, there’s always a market for posh, officer-class types.

“Not always,” points out Penry-Jones. “What goes around comes around; sometimes tall blond chaps fall out of favour because everyone wants Scots or Liverpudlians or redheads and then, eventually, we come back in vogue again.

“One of the downsides of being typecast is that it makes you lazy, because you’re being constantly asked to do the same role, and it all becomes terribly easy.

“The way you keep yourself alive and interested as an actor is to stretch yourself and test yourself. That’s why actors become actors; they don’t want to be the same person every day.”

He insists it is “a fallacy” that he’s posh as he grew up in “deepest south London”. He’s just back from Cape Town, however, where he has been filming Black Sails, a US series about pirates starring Toby Stephens, the British actor, and son of Dame Maggie Smith, as Captain Flint.

“I’m not a pirate,” says Penry-Jones with hammy mournfulness. “I’m an English lord, but Toby is far posher than me, so it’s perfectly reasonable to have a poshy as a pirate.”

The series is a “slow burner” so he won’t – indeed he can’t – say whether he will eventually end up on the high seas. “To be honest, the writers don’t even know yet, which makes it quite fun to do.”

Settling back into family life – they decamped to Hampshire some years ago, keeping a pied-à-terre in the capital – takes about “five days of decompression”, he reckons.

“I don’t lock myself away as such, but I do have an extensive collection of ukuleles, so I just take one out and start practising – playing the same tune repeatedly – which drives everyone away.”

Kirwan, meanwhile, who found fame in Ballykissangel and then as the husky “this isn’t just…” voice of Marks & Spencer’s advertising campaign, is appearing in the hugely well-received West End play, The Weir.

“It’s hard trying to keep both careers going, so we’ve adopted the philosophy that whoever gets the big job goes to work, and the other looks after the kids and keeps domestic life on an even keel,” says Penry-Jones.

“We’re very positive for one another and we’re luckily in the position where we don’t have to take bad work for the sake of having a job.”

“Bad work” being? Penry-Jones demurs with a guffaw.

“I’m not going to say, because the day might yet come when that’s just the sort of work I’ll be grateful for!”

The feeling of mild paranoia which typically besets all actors never quite goes away, he says, which is why being married to another professional is a blessing.

“We take it in turns to build each other up and we’ll reel off each other’s CVs and tell the other how marvellous they are,” he says. “The Weir is great; I have seen it a few times now, and I actually wish I was in it, which is rare because usually you go to see shows and you sit there thinking: 'This is a load of old ––––.’

“And it’s very short, too – no interval – so you can hit the streets by 9.30pm. Theoretically, it means my dear wife could come home every evening, but she’s got hair appointments or morning meetings that require her to stay in the bright lights.”

And of course, regardless of what they might claim, every performer loves being among the bright lights. As Penry-Jones gets ready to head off for his next job – a voiceover for EasyJet – his fellow diners are once again restive and craning for a look.

“I get recognised just the right amount for my ego, but not so much that it feels intrusive,” he admits. “But I was once on a beach in Greece at the height of Spooks mania and I was changing into my swimming trunks with a towel around me, and I could see all these people pulling out their mobiles to take pictures.

“I’m quite a serious swimmer, which means I don’t wear board shorts, so I pulled on my trunks with as much dignity as I could. Then, as I stood at the edge of the water and stretched before diving in, I looked down and – well, let’s just say not everything was tucked safely inside. But nobody saw.”

Or, mercifully, nobody with a smartphone saw. Either way, Penry-Jones can rest assured that he is a rarity: an actor who is not a celebrity.

“I turn up, say the lines, then go home,” he says with a megawatt grin that trails light behind him as he strides off into the lunchtime crowds.